Cd reader for burnin on the fly at 40X

[Dartman]

There are two different hardware version of the 40 max, early limited to 23 DAE and the later version that can do 40 DAE or better. I have a 40 wide and they never came in the newer version so it can only do 23 and that's it.
It's possible he might have the early version and that's why he can't keep up on the fly. I think when they were first released the fastest burners were 12x so it WAS faster then it needed to be. Plextors site has firmware for both so all you have to do is check the firmware in the drive to know if you got lucky or not.

[clawsnoel]

That's true. I have the 1.1x firmware series and it is very, very fast, even exceeds it's rating on many full-length CD's. Sorry to hear you have the Wide version; that was a sad story indeed. One of the few things I have against Plextor; they should have fixed it like they fixed the narrow model.

[clawsnoel]

As a sidenote, the Kenwood TrueX 72x CD-ROM drive was awesome. I had mine and ripped a few hundred CD's quite happily for about two years before it stopped working; cause was more than likely my stupidity and an incident which probably caused an ESD to the drive. My friend has had his 72x for some four years now and still rips often with it. It is too bad Kenwood did not work harder to resolve problems and keep making new drives with the Zen technology, because it was awesome. The drive was near silent and was as fast as a hard drive (well, an older hard drive). I miss my kenny dearly. Don't bother buying one on ebay even if you can find one, because they did have a lot of QC problems, it seems.

[Dartman]

Yup they ewre no help at all when I contacted them inquiring why I kept seeing folks saying they could rip at 40
They informed me the wide was never upgraded and never will be. I spent a lot of money to get the best and it wasn't after a year or so. Also the door keeps haging up about an 8th of a inch from closing, very poor design to have that kind of a problem. They told me to clean it which I did but it started doing it again so I got a LiteOn dvd drive and retired it and my 12x4x32 Plex burner to be replaced also by a LiteOn burner.
It was a great combo and it does still all work, just slow now and I got tired of mucking around with the door mechanism.

[NeilPeart]

Let's not forget that ALL Kenwood CD-ROMs were VERY flaky with any firmware upgrades that were offered. Let's also not forget that the Kenwood's audio extraction was fast but riddled with errors. Every time my company tried to rip audio CDs with any of our Kenwood drives (52, 62 and 72 models), the resulting wav file was full of errors; the Kenwoods simply could not securely extract audio. The day my Kenwood 52X died (after a long 2 months of service) I was actually happy! No more dealing with unreadable media (that every other drive in the world could read) and no more DMA conflicts. The Kenwood CD-ROMs were fast as hell, but they were technically flawed from the outset; this was a design flaw that was never corrected, and after losing tons of money from RMAs and other mishaps the Kenwoods were happily discontinued. The Plextor 40TSi rightfully took its place as the leader and the Asus 52X now sits atop as the monarch of the CD-ROMs.

EDIT: Regarding the Plextor Wide: This drive was marketed to people who didn't read reviews; they simply saw the UltraWide moniker and assumed it was faster because of the faster interface. After reading the SR review way back in the day, I discovered that the older-interface 40TSi was the faster drive because of the upgraded firmware and mechanical improvements that the 1.xx models featured. My Plextor is the only drive that can extract FLAWLESS (no errors at all, unlike Kenwood's failed drives) audio at 40x (or above), though the Asus 52x comes damn close (tops out at 35x or so for secure rips with EAC).

[yi_hsun]

Anybody here think that Mitsumi 54x FX5411M is a good CD-Rom drive to buy?? How about LiteON LTN-527T?? I'm not sure which one is better.